The genomic revolution has led to easy sequencing and cheap “ancestry" tests. White nationalists are paying attention.

Jedidiah Carlson was googling a genetics research paper when he stumbled upon the white nationalist forum Stormfront. Carlson is a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and he is—to be clear—absolutely not a white nationalist. But one link led to another and he ended up reading page after page of Stormfront discussions on the reliability of 23andMe ancestry results and whether Neanderthal interbreeding is the reason for the genetic superiority of whites. Obsession with racial purity is easily channeled, apparently, into an obsession with genetics.

Stormfront has been around since the ’90s, which means it’s been around for the entirety of the genomic revolution. The major milestones in human genetics—sequencing of the first human genome, genetic confirmation that humans came out of Africa, the first mail-in DNA ancestry tests—they’re all there, refracted through the lens of white nationalism. Sure, the commentators sometimes disagreed with scientific findings or mischaracterized them, but they could also be serious about understanding genetics. “The threads would turn into an informal tutoring session and journal club,” observes Carlson. “Some of the posters have a really profound understanding of everyday concepts in population genetics.”

Carlson had stumbled upon Stormfront months ago. As Donald Trump’s election went from unlikely hypothetical to reality, he began tweeting out the disturbing discussions he found—as a call to action for fellow geneticists. “In light of the current political climate,” he says, “I think there’s a much more present danger for our scientific work to become weaponized to enact these ethno-nationalist policies.”

Of course, that is hardly a novel danger. In the early 20th century, Americans used eugenics to justify restrictions on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Then the world changed. The Nazis lost World War II and the racial policies they promulgated became abhorrent. Eugenics turned into a cautionary tale.

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